Personal History

After helping expose all the president's men, two young reporters had to look for second acts.

WOODWARD AND BERNSTEIN

Life in the Shadow of Watergate

By Alicia Shepard

Wiley. 288 pp. $24.95

During a handful of days in April 1976, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein went from being esteemed and honored investigative journalists to something we would now call a brand. Their first book -- All the President's Men, the saga of the two young Metro reporters' Watergate sleuthing for The Washington Post -- topped the paperback bestseller list. Their follow-up volume on the collapse of the Nixon presidency, The Final Days, led the hardcover ranking. The film version of "All the President's Men" opened to stellar reviews and long ticket lines, conflating the image of the actual reporters with those of the actors who portrayed them, Robert Redford as Woodward and Dustin Hoffman as Bernstein.

What was not clear then -- except to Woodward and Bernstein themselves -- was that at the very moment their myth was being consecrated, their active journalistic partnership was ending. In the three decades since The Final Days, the men have traced paths as distinctly different as their personalities. Woodward, the workhorse, has remained at The Post and written or coauthored 12 more books, bestsellers all, as the Beltway's leading chronicler of presidential, judicial and military power. (Full disclosure: My book editor, Alice Mayhew, is also Woodward's. I have never met or even spoken to him.) Bernstein left the paper and often attracted more attention for his gaudy social life than for his two post-Watergate books.

This sort of trajectory has an obvious appeal for any biographer. After all, once you've helped topple the most corrupt president in the history of the republic, what do you do for the rest of your professional life? What other accomplishment could possibly measure up? And when you add in the envy factor (never one to be underestimated in journalistic circles), the allure of "Woodstein" as subject matter grows even greater. Back in 1976, a reporter asked Woodward what life felt like as a celebrity. He replied, quite presciently, "What I really think you're asking me is 'When are you going to screw up?' "

Sure enough, Bernstein's ex-wife Nora Ephron avenged his marital infidelities in a book of her own, the roman à clef Heartburn, which was also made into a film. Woodward received withering critiques from Renata Adler and Joan Didion, among others, for supposedly turning from a muckraker into a White House stenographer. The use of anonymous sourcing that Woodward and Bernstein immortalized in the person of the famous Watergate source known as Deep Throat was adopted indiscriminately by lesser reporters, helping to erode what public confidence in journalism still exists.

And we know most of this. We know it because of the voluminous writings about Woodward and Bernstein over the years, and we know it because of their own expansive statements to myriad interviewers. (Both men, in fact, have proved admirably candid about acknowledging both personal and professional shortcomings.)

So Alicia Shepard faces a very large problem in her dual biography, Woodward and Bernstein, and she never quite surmounts it. A respected media critic and journalism professor, Shepard has produced a thorough, diligent book, but one that feels, well, innocuous. It efficiently synthesizes much of the existing coverage of Woodward and Bernstein, augmented by some energetic research of her own, but it told me very little I didn't know before opening the cover.

Let me clarify that cavil. Certainly, Shepard has unearthed a range of interesting details. One learns, for example, that Woodward's penchant for investigation began as a child stealthily exploring the office papers of his father, a prominent judge in suburban Chicago. The most fascinating pages of the book describe the creative process that the director Alan J. Pakula used to create "All the President's Men." Shepard describes his shrewd analysis of the prickly interdependence of Woodward and Bernstein -- the Navy veteran and the red-diaper baby -- during their Watergate coverage:

"Both men initially felt that the other one was not loyal. Bernstein believed that Woodward would sell him out for an editor's approval, and Woodward felt that Bernstein would sell him out to anyone in the newsroom whom Bernstein preferred. . . . Woodward was eventually surprised to find that he could rely on Bernstein, that Bernstein was capable of hard work and worthy of his trust. Bernstein came to learn that Woodward . . . was not the Establishment or a straight-arrow WASP."

When Shepard ventures a conclusion of her own, she acts judiciously. She gives Bernstein well-deserved credit for Loyalties, his honest and tortured memoir of his parents' involvement with the American Communist Party. To the pervasive critics of Woodward's method -- the reliance on unidentified sources, the unsourced but supposedly verbatim quotations, the reluctance to offer analysis or opinion -- she reminds us that "Woodward is a reporter, a fact-gatherer," rather than a historian. In gathering facts, she continues, Woodward does not simply play the uncritical, deferential confessor to high-ranking officials, as Adler and Didion have contended, but generates much of his material from the lower rungs of officialdom.

The question remains, though, whether such passages are enough to justify a full-length book that otherwise travels a lot of very familiar road. For me, who recalls the Watergate era and has read much of the Woodstein oeuvre, the answer is no. In my life as a journalism professor, I can imagine recommending Shepard's book to my students as a kind of reference text on two important figures. But it does not grasp a historical moment, or several emblematic lives, in the enduring, edifying way that, for instance, William Prochnau's Once Upon a Distant War did for Vietnam War correspondents.

Someday, when all the contents of the Woodstein archive are unsealed, someone will be able to write the book that deserves to be written about the duo. It will look intricately at the way Bernstein and, to a far greater degree, Woodward interacted with sources both famous and obscure, the way they played the power game. Until then, Shepard's volume can dutifully hold the shelf space. ·

Samuel G. Freedman, the author of six books, is a professor of journalism at Columbia University.